MUSIC: CD buyers beware: Discs may be censored

Doc Ross is an unabashed metalhead, and he hoped to get a fix with Metallica's "Garage Inc."

But when the Denver resident popped the album into his disc player, songs such as "So What" sounded like Morse Code. Every expletive (of which there are many in the Anti-Nowhere League cover) was bleeped out. So was every objectionable word in all the other songs.

"I'm grooving right along until I hear beep, beep, beep, beep," Ross said. "The spell was broken. It wasn't even music."

Ross scanned the liner notes, and discovered that they too had been sanitized, a bunch of cartoon-like symbols used in place of anything that smacked of filth.

What the $&!?

The explanation was simple: he bought the disc at Wal-Mart, just one of a few nationwide chains that stock nothing but clean, sanitized versions of best-selling albums. It's hardly a dirty secret, and it's been going on ever since Tipper Gore began shouting out four-alarm bulletins about what America's children were hearing.

But releasing two different album versions has become commonplace: consider that the Top 5 albums in last week's R&B charts - DMX's "Flesh of My Flesh Blood of My Blood," Mystikal's "Ghetto Fabulous," Jay Z's "Vol. 2 ... Hard Knock Life," R. Kelly's "R." and Busta Rhymes' "E.L.E." - are all available in both clean and explicit versions.

Label reps don't like to talk about why they go to the expense of releasing two types of the same album, but it doesn't take a degree in economics to understand the philosophy. Wal-Mart, which has 2,400 stores across the country, won't sell anything with a parental advisory sticker on it.

"You can't have a multi-platinum record if you're not in Targets or Wal-Marts," said Dave Montez, manager of Denver's Tower Records. "And your Wal-Marts, your Targets, they can't put out a record with explicit language on it."

The same goes at Angelo's CDs in Aurora, Colo., likely the Denver metro area's largest seller of hip-hop.

"Absolutely nobody over the age of 16 would be caught dead with the clean version," said Greg Livingston, the director of advertising and marketing for the store.

But here's the rub: How do customers know whether they're buying the clean or the dirty?

As Ross said to the Wal-Mart clerk when he returned "Garage Inc.: for a refund: "There's no sign back there that says this album has been mutilated. They censored my Metallica."

Indeed, the black and white parental advisory stickers will warn you about foul language, but there's no sticker that gives the buyer a heads-up that the filth has been filtered out and replaced by a bunch of beeps.

The best way to assure you're getting everything the artist intended is to make sure that there's a parental advisory sticker. But even that's not foolproof. The labels slap them on albums voluntarily.

Ross has his own simple solution: avoid Wal-Mart. But what about other stores? They all have their own policies, and you'll never know when they change.

It's clearest on the Internet, where web sites such as Amazon.com and CDnow give the buyer a clear choice between the clean and the explicit.

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